Fred and Lil with Grandma K in my parents’ Keeler Avenue apartment.
Half a year after learning of Ebner’s death, and six months pregnant, Mom was feted by forty-six coworkers and friends at her farewell party in April of 1946. For nine years, she had devoted her formidable organizational skills and driven work ethic to serve as executive secretary to the president of the Bayer Company. With Mom’s departure, her boss had to hire two women to do the work she had done singlehandedly, a fact which Mom spoke of proudly, but which I see as sad and prescient. She would forever do more than was expected, gaining no recompense in return.
At the end of my mother’s last day at the Bayer Company, Mom and Dad returned to their apartment to find Grandma K sitting silent and morose on their flowered sofa. “I’m very tired,” was all she said.
“What’s the trouble?” Mom asked.
“I walked all the way from my house to downtown.” It was a distance of eight miles.
“Why on earth would you take such a long walk?”
“Somebody told me to.”
Two months later, frantic about her mother’s increasingly unstable behavior, Mom typed up a twenty-five-page report for the psychiatrist entitled, “Case History of Mrs. Louise Koroschetz, April 13, 1946 to June 18, 1946.” Until I dug through the archives, I had never seen this report and had heard only snippets of Grandma K’s bizarre behavior from this time. Mom had told me only, “I cried buckets of tears over my mother.”
Just as a playwright presents characters on a play’s opening page, Mom listed the various people mentioned in the case history, followed by the role of each in the unfolding saga. Her words reveal a troubling drama, featuring a woman with an unraveling mind—in an era when treatment for mental illness was mired in the Dark Ages.
Mom’s meticulous records drew me into her anguished helplessness with each of Grandma K’s heart-stopping delusions, exposing my grandmother’s fractured sense of reality, as if she viewed life through a broken mirror. Mom entered scores of examples in vivid detail. A sampling: Grandma believed people spied on her, that the landlord purposely didn’t repair a banging pipe in the bathroom so he could track when she was home, that the tenants one floor down burgled her apartment. She locked up her radio in a cabinet, fearing that Peeping Toms used it as a magical device to leer at her as she undressed. Dead Grandpa K spoke to her. With delight, she told my parents about an amusing speech she had made to the president, who had laughed good-naturedly.
Leaning over her back-porch railing, Grandma K screeched at the women in the apartment below: “Why are you running a whorehouse here? You’re all WHORES!” She spoke in absurd riddles, about double-talk and signs and motions people made. Mom wrote:
When she gets into one of these spells, her eyes get a rather wild look, and she will start raising her voice louder and louder, and then she pounds her fist on the table to emphasize a statement: “I’m an American! The red, white, and blue must fly all over the world!”
The case history left me breathless with the impact of Grandma’s mental illness on both my parents. In the last few months of Mom’s pregnancy, they had no time or peace to relish the upcoming arrival of their first child, no privacy— only unending strife, worry, and aggravation. Dad was still grieving for his brother but had to draw upon his emotional reserves to support Mom.
“Lee-lee-an! Lee-lee-an!” My grandmother stood on the front steps of her apartment building late one June night, crying out my mother’s name in a drawn-out Austrian accent as the summer breeze nibbled at her nightgown. Her landlady called my parents. Groggy and frightened, they drove the seven miles to pick up Grandma K.
When they arrived, they found her sitting on the front steps still in her nightclothes and slippers, clutching her purse, her eyes unfocused and bewildered. “Mama, come home with us,” said Mom gently, helping her shaky mother to stand, leading her to the car.
On the ride back to my parents’ place, Grandma held her purse close to her mouth, mumbling, “False alarm! False alarm!”
“What are you doing, Mama?”
“This is a microphone. I can hear better what they’re saying to me.”
Over the next two days, my mother created the case history with its twenty-five pages of Grandma’s irrational behaviors. After reading through Mom’s document and meeting Grandma K on June 19, the psychiatrist prescribed electro-convulsive therapy (ECT), also known as shock treatment.
ECT was a recent breakthrough in treating psychoses and mood disorders in the 1940s. It was used for the first time on a human subject in Italy on April 15, 1938, and seemed to cure the patient of his hallucinations. Enthusiastically embraced in the United States, shock treatment was to be administered to my grandmother, just six years after its introduction into this country.
Following Grandma’s ECT treatments, Mom was distraught with what she saw. Grandma K didn’t speak a word, and she had no memory—not of her recent meals, nor any of Mom’s previous visits. The psychiatrist brushed aside my mother’s fear. “She’s nicely confused,” he said.
Over the next two weeks, Grandma’s disorientation slowly dissipated until, by July 14, she was discharged from the hospital. “She seemed very normal,” Mom wrote. “We took her to Lincoln Park on a picnic. The psychiatrist performed a miracle on Mama, and we can really feel grateful.”
I sensed Mom’s desperate and futile hope in those words. It was an era when few effective treatments existed for mental illness, when the very diagnosis was shameful and misunderstood. Families grasped at any straw that might hold them steady in the storms of insanity, so Mom eagerly believed this respite from her mother’s outbursts meant she was cured.
The only real miracle in their lives occurred just three days after Grandma K returned to my parents’ apartment. On July 17, Mom gave birth to Paul Ebner Gartz, his middle name in honor of Dad’s dead brother.
Grandma Gartz’s response to the usually joyous news of a first grandchild was grim: “Don’t have children. They’ll only be used as cannon fodder.”